I've mentioned this on HackerNews before: it was spring of '86 when the fractal research group was finally getting around to playing with the software we'd been using to create our publication images. I was a sr graphics consultant at the Boston University 3D Graphics Lab, and due to my being staff at the graphics lab my user account had unlimited processing privileges. This was necessary to get the fractal renders in any reasonable time, running on the University's IBM 3090 mainframe which the entire university used for practically everything. Not really considering the consequences, I made a short program that would generate a 256x256x256 fractal cube of sin()+cos(), which is the specific formula contribution of mine for the "Beauty of Fractals" book. Well, I should have considered the consequences: I launched the program, and immediately everyone's terminals in the graphics lab froze. Suspicious it was due to my program, I figured it would finish in a minute and everything would be okay. Someone mentioned the larger terminal room downstairs with a few hundred terminals was also frozen. Then I heard someone in the hallways shouting "who the hell is bsln5!" (my username.) In a minute the graphics labs will full of the mainframe admins shouting red faced at me to kill my process. I killed it and was immediately escorted out of the building and told I'd be in a hearing for my malicious use of the mainframe. Well, once everything was figured out, I had my unlimited processing privilege revoked, and a new policy was put in place for high compute research projects. During the evaluation it was determined if let run to completion, the program would have run for 35 years - finishing just last year.